Life and Death in Palestine: Information gift for a Premier — Day 16

Why is anti-Semitism the only form of bigotry ever mentioned, never anti-Palestinian slurs?

No 1667 Posted by fw, May 10, 2016

Dear Premier Wynne,

Below is my information gift for you on this, Day 16, of my intended 19-day project to fill in some possible gaps in your knowledge base with respect to life and death in the Israeli Occupied Territories.

In the context of today’s topic, anti-Semitism, many would accuse me of being antisemitic on the basis of the content of the emails I have been sending you. Fortunately, I am in good company, as the following email will illustrate.

Here is an excerpt from today’s information gift, published by Mondoweiss, co-edited by an anti-Zionist Jewish American. –

“No other human rights movement I can think of is automatically accused of being racist. The underlying assumption is that Palestinians just don’t matter that much, so anyone who expresses moral outrage or uses the normal tools of protest, like boycotts, can’t possibly be motivated by human rights concerns. They must be antisemites or at least examined very closely for antisemitism before being given a clean bill of health. Who examines the examiners for their bigotry? No one. Hillary Clinton’s speech to AIPAC in March is the absolute gold standard in demonstrating this. You can see the pathological bigotry in the pro-Israel movement entailed by the fact that the presumptive liberal nominee for President takes for granted she can label a human rights movement as antisemitic and not be called out on it.

The opening segment of this article is reposted below. To read the entire piece click on the following linked title.

When it comes to the Israel/Palestine subject, the elephant in the room is that the only form of bigotry that is ever noticed is antisemitism.

In the British argument over whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, the pro-Israel side is lumping in defensible statements, dumb or insensitive statements, and actual antisemitic statements from the anti-Zionists into one big pot. And so the well-intentioned commentator, like Gaby Hinsliff, in this Guardian piece, Antisemitism has rocked Labour’s self-belief,is too lazy to try and make the distinctions and then screws up herself – when she says it’s anti-Semitic to deny “Israel’s right to exist” without seeming to realize that Israel wouldn’t exist as a Jewish state without ethnic cleansing and discrimination.

Because nobody cares about anti-Palestinian bigotry.

No other human rights movement I can think of is automatically accused of being racist. The underlying assumption is that Palestinians just don’t matter that much, so anyone who expresses moral outrage or uses the normal tools of protest, like boycotts, can’t possibly be motivated by human rights concerns. They must be antisemites or at least examined very closely for antisemitism before being given a clean bill of health.

Who examines the examiners for their bigotry? No one.

The lumping in of statements is crucial to the pro-Israel effort. People like me find it exhausting and dispiriting to go through line by line what people have said, making distinctions between what is defensible, what is stupid or insensitive and what is genuinely hateful, and so lazy liberals take the easy way out and follow the lead of the hasbarists.

It is the job of journalists and pundits to make these distinctions.

But nobody in the mainstream even notices the anti-Palestinian bigotry.

Hillary Clinton’s speech to AIPAC in March is the absolute gold standard in demonstrating this. You can see the pathological bigotry in the pro-Israel movement entailed by the fact that the presumptive liberal nominee for President takes for granted she can label a human rights movement as antisemitic and not be called out on it, and now the current outrage is all about some mostly obscure Labour politicians, the most prominent being former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, some of whom have apologized for what they said.

But listen to what Clinton said about the Palestinian solidarity movement. They’re a bunch of anti-Semites.

Many of the young people here today [at AIPAC] are on the front lines of the battle to oppose the alarming boycott, divestment and sanctions movement known as BDS.

Particularly at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise across the world, especially in Europe, we must repudiate all efforts to malign, isolate and undermine Israel and the Jewish people.

I’ve been sounding the alarm for a while now. As I wrote last year in a letter to the heads of major American Jewish organizations, we have to be united in fighting back against BDS. Many of its proponents have demonized Israeli scientists and intellectuals, even students.

To all the college students who may have encountered this on campus, I hope you stay strong. Keep speaking out. Don’t let anyone silence you, bully you or try to shut down debate, especially in places of learning like colleges and universities.

It’s not just that Clinton’s AIPAC speech unfairly equated BDS supporters with antisemites. It’s that in making that equation she herself was revealing anti-Palestinian bigotry.

And nobody in the mainstream thinks about it that way. It wouldn’t cross their minds– even as the conventional wisdom on that speech was that she was “pandering.”

Which is another way of saying that anti-Palestinian racism is the widely accepted norm and people don’t even see it.

END OF OPENING SEGMENT — To read the entire article, click on the above linked title…